More Magical Gestures

Not long ago, a clever assistant professor from the University of Washington produced a little hack call WiSee, which allowed a user to control his devices using the signals in his home…and also allowed people outside his home to creepily monitor him inside.  The hack was an elegant interpretation of the amplitude of signals generated by the local WiFi signal(s).

Now the clever assistant professor Shyam Gollakota has produced an even more clever hack called AllSee, which uses ambient TV signals to do much the same thing, with less creepiness.  Check the video above, in which “We build AllSee prototypes that can recognize gestures on RFID tags and power-harvesting sensors. We also integrate our hardware with an off-the-shelf Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone”.  Better still, there’s a nice paper which describes in detail how to make one for yourself (if you have serious math programming chops and an affinity for do-it-yourself electronics).

Despite the slightly high barrier to entry for normal folks, a factory could implement this for much less than a buck in quantity for tablets and phones and computers, and lots of other less intelligent gizmos.  It consumes very little power (unlike my phone’s screen) and so can make a serous improvement in the life of such devices’ batteries.

I urge Dr.Gollakota to create an Instructable for this project, mostly because I want one.